On Wednesday, I was visiting a friend at her work in NDG and decided to stop in to the Salvation Army thrift store across the street before heading home. I’ve been looking for a good wool sweater, and I found one.

I also found this:

It was inside what I thought at first was a sort of late-eighties Rolodex: two drawers that looked to be the right size for index cards, enclosed in a plastic casing of fake woodgrain like the television sets of my childhood. It turned out to be someone’s collection of audio cassettes: the Doors, the soundtrack to Man of La Mancha, and various others. And this mixtape.

I still make mixtapes every now and again. It’s becoming harder and harder to find blank cassettes for sale, but last time I did I stocked up. Making mixtapes for someone is such a personal activity that it seems particularly strange to find one on display, in public, for sale. I wonder how it ended up at that store, and who made it, and who they made it for, and how it left their possession. I thought about buying it for the novelty of the thing, but really, it wasn’t mine to have.